[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Battle of the old Middle East hands
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, November 22 2002

WASHINGTON - As in all things linked to United States foreign policy these
days, the question of who should lead a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is a matter
of deep disagreement within the administration of US President George W
Bush.

On the one hand, neo-conservative hawks around Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney have lobbied heavily for the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), and especially its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

On the other hand, Middle East specialists in the State Department and their
colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have generally favored
former military officers who are believed to retain influence in Iraq's
army.

While the contending sides agreed last summer to co-sponsor meetings among
Iraqi opposition leaders in hopes of coaxing a united front out of them in
advance of US military action to oust Saddam Hussein, the task appears as
daunting as ever.

In the past two weeks, both sides have been dealt significant setbacks, even
as the US military build-up around Iraq has shifted into overdrive, and CIA
officers have returned in force to Kurdish northern Iraq for the first time
since Saddam's ground forces routed the CIA-backed INC there in 1996.

Washington had hoped for a planned meeting of top opposition leaders to
begin in Brussels at the end of this week. But infighting among the groups,
sparked by the INC's demand that several hundred more of its backers be
invited, resulted in a three-week delay and a change of venue - to London,
if the British government agrees - according to State Department officials.

While anti-Chalabi forces in the administration saw the delay as a victory,
they received a major setback of their own on Tuesday when a Danish judge
formally charged General Nizar al-Khazraji, a former chief of staff of the
Iraqi army, with crimes against humanity. The general was accused for his
alleged role in the infamous 1988 Anfal campaign, when almost 200,000
Kurdish villagers were killed, some by chemical weapons, in the closing days
of the Iran-Iraq war.

Khazraji, a self-described nationalist who left Iraq in 1995 and has denied
the charges, has been championed by CIA and State Department officials as
the best candidate to replace Saddam after a US invasion. The charges were
reportedly issued just as he was preparing to leave for the Gulf.

Al-Khazaraji's indisposition is likely to strengthen Chalabi, who has made
no secret of his desire to become Iraq's Hamid Karzai, the Afghan politician
hand-picked by Washington to become the country's interim president after
last year's military campaign.

But unlike Karzai, London-based Chalabi, a wealthy, US-educated banker whose
family fled Iraq when the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, has lived in
exile virtually all of his adult life. Close to Jordan's Hashemite monarchy
until 1989, when he fled the country after being charged with bank fraud, he
first came to prominence in Iraqi politics when he launched the INC in 1992.

Chalabi, who hails from an aristocratic Shi'ite family, has depicted himself
as an Iraqi nationalist dedicated to human rights, the rule of law and a
federal structure for a future Iraq that would guarantee greater autonomy
for the country's disparate regions and ethnic groups.

That image has won him significant support in the US Congress, which in 1998
approved the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), a bill that provided almost US$100
million in aid for opposition groups, particularly his INC.

But what has really given him political muscle in Washington is the
enthusiastic backing he has received from a group of neo-conservatives
closely identified with Israel's Likud Party and associated with the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC).

Rumsfeld and Cheney, charter members of the PNAC, recruited their top
foreign policy aides heavily from these two groups, while the AEI's Richard
Perle, who heads Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, has been friends with
Chalabi for some 20 years.

Aside from his avowal of Western ideals, Chalabi's attraction to these
forces appears based mainly on the belief that an INC government in Baghdad
would fatally weaken what one influential neo-conservative thinker and Perle
colleague, David Wurmser, has called a "PLO-Syria-Iraq-Iran axis" against
Israel, and strengthen a burgeoning alliance between Israel, Turkey and
Jordan, to which Iraq could then be added.

In addition, a democratic Iraq, according to these forces, would set in
motion a series of upheavals against authoritarian regimes, including Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that could bring more open and representative
governments to power.

But the State Department and the CIA, as well as retired high-ranking
military officers with experience in the Middle East and the Gulf, have
openly scoffed at these notions, beginning with Chalabi himself. Despite his
professed democratic values, according to these critics, other INC leaders
have complained repeatedly about his centralized control over the
organization.

Indeed, the main constituents of the INC - the Kurdish groups in the north,
and the Shi'ite, Teheran-based Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which together
may have as many as 100,000 men under arms - have repeatedly dropped out of
the umbrella group, and last summer joined with the Iraq National Accord, a
group of former Iraqi military and intelligence officers with close CIA
connections, to create the "Group of Four".

"The INC claims to be an umbrella, but it doesn't cover anyone," noted one
State Department official this week.

Chalabi's personal style has fueled charges that he is unreliable. The
former head of the US Central Command, retired general Anthony Zinni, who is
also a top Middle East advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has been
particularly outspoken, referring to Chalabi and his INC colleagues as
"silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London".

Despite their agreement to work together, the two administration factions
still appear to be jockeying on behalf of their favorites. For example, the
Pentagon succeeded in wresting control of most of the unspent money from the
ILA last summer and is using it to train Iraqi exiles recruited through the
INC.

At the same time, the State Department and CIA reportedly blocked a proposed
intelligence-gathering project that the Pentagon wanted the INC to carry
out.